Last City on This Side of the Pole

Even in midsummer, it’s a chilly 40 degrees. That’s about as warm as it gets. The terrain is flat, bleak and desolate, with no trees to soften the landscape.

Only one tour company brings travelers here--from May through September, the best months to visit. There’s no nightlife. Whale blubber is considered the local haute cuisine.

But while Barrow, with its mere handful of shops and restaurants, might not sound like the most alluring tourist destination in the world, it can be fascinating.

Its most eccentric claim to fame is that it’s the northernmost city in North America, set on the edge of a roiling, steel-gray sea. It is also the largest Eskimo settlement on the continent.

Barrow is 722 miles by plane from Anchorage, 502 miles from Fairbanks. Only one of Alaska’s intrastate airlines, MarkAir, makes the flight daily from Anchorage. There is no way to get here by car.

The only tour operator in town, Tundra Tours, greets visitors after they get off the plane, distributing green or royal-blue parkas with fur-edged hoods that must be returned upon leaving.

The tour operator is owned by the Arctic Slope Regional Corp., a company that controls the development of tourism facilities in the region.

Barrow, of course, sits on top of vast oil fields (no one knows for sure how large), and the resulting wealth has shaken to the core the former subsistence culture of Alaska’s Native Americans.

A small group of writers, invited by the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau during the Midwest Travel Writers’ Assn. convention in Anchorage in August, 1988, were taken on a tour of the town by a driver-guide in a white-painted school bus over paved roads and pitted mud tracks.

Wooden shacks and shanties leaned crazily against new structures, such as the modern Alaska Court System building with its shiny, heat-squandering glass windows.

Carefully crafted whaling boats were propped next to bright aluminum skiffs, and old wooden sleds looked fragile and weathered in contrast to the north’s most ubiquitous new form of transportation, the snowmobile.

Pickup trucks stood next to excitable, chained huskies, and the constant drone of the wind was broken by chunky-wheeled, all-terrain bikes buzzing around as their drivers steered and clutched youngsters to their chests at the same time.

Traditional scenes endure, however. Outside one front door, someone has hung the yellow-gray hide of a polar bear. Depending on the time of year, one might see leathery strips of whale, seal, caribou, bear and salmon meat hanging in rows from drying racks next to wooden houses.

More disturbing is the flotsam and jetsam of the world that seems to fill everyone’s front yard--from rusted auto parts and blunted knife blades to old clothes and fishing gear. The locals believe that this precious junk, imported from a great distance, might come in handy some day.

Barrow has no sidewalks; indoor plumbing still is rare, and fresh water is hauled from a lake four miles away. In winter, the closest block of ice is melted for water.

The wind howls constantly. Even in late August, several inches of snow intrude upon Barrow’s brief summer, a reminder of the long, pitch-black glacial winter days to come when the normal daily temperature dips to minus 24.

A guide for tourists wandering around this town of about 3,000, will point out the “northernmost softball field in America” (everything in Barrow gets a “northernmost” label attached to it), where, even during a chest-constricting wind-chill factor of one degree above zero, fanatical players and fans crowd the diamond.

After the tour passes an archeological site, where the permafrost has preserved historic and prehistoric sod houses, artifacts and even some Eskimo hunters still to be unearthed and studied, the bus makes its way over the frigid shore road to Point Barrow, the northernmost point of land on the continent.

Here the tourists shiver in the shelter of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, where a museum contains native American handicrafts. Adjacent is the Distant Early Warning Line, a watching post aimed at the Soviet Union across the Chukchi Sea.

It takes a walk of about a mile or so across an ice-fringed black-sand beach to reach the actual northernmost point, but many choose to merely stand in the shelter of the bus and gaze at the distant vista.

The drive back to town is as lively as the run out. There’s a beach hike and a view of great metallic-blue icebergs that float by.

On the way back, the tour passes the “northernmost totem pole” and the “northernmost house.” Beyond these stretch an eclectic gaggle of jerry-built shacks that are used--believe it or not--as summer holiday cottages during the duck hunting season, when the birds migrate overhead and snow disappears briefly from the ground.

The Old Cape Smythe Whaling & Trading Co., about 1 1/2 miles out of town and last of the town’s original general stores, is still standing.

Closer to Barrow, a few wooden grave markers peek up from the snow. Since wood here is hard to come by, these rare tombstones were used only for Barrow’s most notable residents.

Mattie’s Cafe, a white, New England-style wooden structure with a whalebone arch, fronts the beach and is open only for tours. This historic building was originally the Point Barrow Refuge Station. Naturally, Mattie’s has another claim to fame: A sign proclaims it “The Northernmost Cafe on the American Continent.”

Outside sits a splendid example of a traditional whaling boat built of driftwood, lashed together with rawhide and covered with walrus skin. Called an oomiak by the local Inupiat Eskimos, this fragile-looking but sturdy boat still is used by whaling captains who take crews across the ice to open water to hunt bowhead whales.

The seasons are when the ice breaks during the spring, from April 15 to the end of May, and again in the fall for about two weeks, from early to mid-September when the ice reforms.

Only Native Americans can hunt for whales, and even they are limited to between 10 and 15 strikes a year. Every bit of the whale is utilized, but the Eskimos’ favorite part to eat is the rubbery skin with a layer of blubber attached.

Called muktuk , this can be eaten several ways, including raw, pickled or boiled. The pickled style is said to be the most appealing to uninitiated palates.

Boats made of whale hides or walrus or seal skins dot the horizon as the bus returns to the heart of Barrow, past the Utqiagvik Presbyterian Church--its sign hung between two whale vertebra.

The tour stops at the swankiest of the town’s three hotels, the Top of the World Hotel, owned by the Arctic Slope Regional Corp., which also owns Tundra Tours. The lobby provides a cozy spot where visitors can take a break, warm up with a cup of coffee and buy and mail post cards.

Visitors can wander up and down the few adjacent streets and onto the nearby beach to watch huge ships cruise by, or venture into the new, modern grocery store, built partially underground.

Because everything in Barrow is imported, a box of cereal costs $5.59, a bottle of aspirin $9, half a gallon of milk $5.97 and a package of Fig Newtons $5.

A cultural show is put on for every tour group by the locals at the Barrow Community Center. Native dances are performed and crafts such as mukluk (Eskimo boot making) are demonstrated. Afterward, the traditional blanket toss is performed, weather permitting.

Following the show, handicrafts are sold. This is a good place to make a purchase. For example, an expertly fashioned Eskimo mask bought in Barrow for $20 was priced at $70 in Anchorage.

At the end of the tour, as a memento, Barrow visitors receive a colorful certificate from MarkAir, certifying that the owner of the certificate has crossed the Arctic Circle (330 miles to the south) to become one of the northernmost travelers in the world.

The last thing for visitors to view is outside of Barrow’s postage-stamp-size airport. There, a pink-and-gray marble memorial has been dedicated to Will Rogers and Wiley Post, who lost their lives near here in a plane crash in 1935.